More bipartisan gridlock and gamesmanship, obviously:
Late on the night of Sept. 30, with the federal government just hours away from shutting down, House Republicans quietly made a small change to the House rules that blocked a potential avenue for ending the shutdown.
“What people don’t know is that they rigged the rules of the House to keep the government shut down,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), ranking member of the House Budget Committee, told TPM in an interview. “This is a blatant effort to make sure that the Senate bill did not come up for a vote.”
With less than two hours to midnight and shutdown, Speaker John Boehner’s latest plan emerged. House Republicans would “insist” on their latest spending bill, including the anti-Obamacare provision, and request a conference with the Senate to resolve the two chambers’ differences.
Under normal House rules, according to House Democrats, once that bill had been rejected again by the Senate, then any member of the House could have made a motion to vote on the Senate’s bill. But previously, House Republicans had made a small but hugely consequential move to block them from doing it.
But the House Rules Committee voted the night of Sept. 30 to change that rule for this specific bill. They added language dictating that any motion “may be offered only by the majority Leader or his designee.”
So unless House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) wanted the Senate spending bill to come to the floor, it wasn’t going to happen. And it didn’t.
“I’ve never seen this rule used. I’m not even sure they were certain we would have found it,” a House Democratic aide told TPM. “This was an overabundance of caution on their part. ‘We’ve got to find every single crack in the dam that water can get through and plug it.'”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that before,” Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told TPM. Republican staff on the House Rules Committee did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
How many ordinary people are laid off, losing money or going without Head Start or WIC as a result of this stunt, again?
Why is it these Tea Party clowns only work this hard when they’re destroying something?
OzarkHillbilly
Cause that’s all they do.
piratedan
I have faith in the ability of our MSM to try and float the narratives that their masters assign to them, reality and facts be damned!
kooks
I think it’s interesting that they gave the designation to Cantor instead of Boehner. Does the Speaker of the House not get to make motions on the floor, so they reserved the right for the Majority Leader instead? Just curious if this is an issue of process or if there’s more going on here….
hrumpole
When (and it will happen eventually) the D’s take the House back, I hope there’s a long memory.
hrumpole
When (and it will happen eventually) the D’s take the House back, I hope there’s a long memory.
JPL
Found this on Costa’s twitter site… Alchemy Destiny said WSJ says House plan would permanently remove power of Treasury to use “extraordinary measures” The debt limit extension is not clean it appears.
assholes.. Lew kept us going by using extraordinary measures for months…
Frankensteinbeck
Hate. Assholery, the desire to hurt people, is what binds the Republican Party together. The Tea Party are mostly the evangelical culture war right, the most dedicated faction to hurting people. They’ve convinced themselves it’s a religious virtue. Now they’re terrified of obsolescence, and they’ve pulled out all the stops to cause as much misery as they can.
Belafon
@OzarkHillbilly: Do they even know how to do anything else?
//
The ad on the right side currently says “Personally thank Prime Minister Netanyahu for bringing sanity back to the United Nations. Send a letter to prime minister Netanyahu.” What did he do, other than bring a picture of a cartoon bomb?
Sophist
Because doing what you love never feels like work.
Emma
This thing is giving me a galloping migraine. Not only because my retirement account might start losing money, but because I find myself on the same side with people who usually give me severe agitas:
President Obama is leading. He is protecting the very rules that are the foundation of any healthy democracy. He is leading by not giving in to this blackmail, because if he did he would undermine the principle of majority rule that is the bedrock of our democracy. That system guarantees the minority the right to be heard and to run for office and become the majority, but it also ensures that once voters have spoken, and their representatives have voted — and, if legally challenged, the Supreme Court has also ruled in their favor — the majority decision holds sway. A minority of a minority, which has lost every democratic means to secure its agenda, has no right to now threaten to tank our economy if its demands are not met. If we do not preserve this system, nothing will ever be settled again in American politics.
Supposedly, that’s Tom Friedman!!! http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/your-shutdown-false-equivalence-reader-for-thursday/280479/
Kay
I’m getting a little tired of the “John Boehner as Victim of the Tea Party” nonsense.
How carefully was this planned? Where were the Mythical Moderates while this was going on?
smintheus
These are the Rules Committee members in question.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: They are as real as the Yeti or Nessie.
Seanly
@JPL:
So they are willing to do a short term debt limit increase & then throw a poison pill into it?
chopper
@Seanly:
mah nishtanah?
Frankensteinbeck
I’m confused. Don’t they need the Senate and President to sign off on a change of the Treasury’s powers?
JPL
@Seanly: If that’s true, then yup. I guess the meaning of clean bill doesn’t mean what they think it does. Reid fell for Boehner’s bullshit before, give me this please and I’ll get it passed.
also, too. if true, when will msm call Boehner a liar?
Juju
@Emma: Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
Riding their unicorns through a blizzard of fairy dust on a rainbow of course.
RaflW
Michael Kinsley is my nomination for worst person in the world for today.
That is all.
ETA: I won’t even link to his insane, deluded surrender-monkey bullshit (or is TNR trolling the entire left today?)
catclub
The last government shutdown was three weeks, over Christmas and new years.
If this one goes four weeks – right before holiday shopping season – I will be surprised.
The effects are cumulative and beginning to show up on the news.
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: Hiding in the bunkers hoping they don’t get a primary challenger.
Botsplainer
@smintheus:
Four Dems and nine GOPers, heavily laden with Florida and Texas wingnuts, with Viginia Foxxxxxxxxxxxxy for good measure?
Jesus!
fuddmain
@smintheus:
Figured my rep, Daniel Webster, would be involved. Ugh.
kindness
When the talking heads of the MSM start hitting the fainting couch over the rules change & cover up, well then there will be some fierce snowball fights going on in hell.
The game is rigged. We all know it. Now we gotta get ‘the people’ to know it because those same talking heads…they won’t tell them unless they can frame it as ‘both sides do it’.
Dee Loralei
@kooks: I wonder if they designated Cantor, rather than Boehner, because they don’t trust the Orangeman either.
Roger Moore
@kooks:
I think the Speaker always has the power to bring stuff to the floor if he wants. The big thing is that they’re bypassing the normal rules to make things harder because they know they can’t get their preferred outcome unless they block all the alternatives.
Kay
@Emma:
I think they should continue to say “Americans” want Obamacare repealed.
What do you do with a political Party who not only loses a Presidential election, but then simply “disappears” the millions of people who voted for the winner?
What is that? It’s not “politics.” They’re not even saying “screw you” to the majority anymore. Now they’ve just removed us from the American category. I can’t be the only person who hears this.
? Martin
@JPL: That’s not possible as described. Congress doesn’t have the authority to micromanage how Treasury operates, and if they did try to outlaw those measures, it’d have to be a massive law. Or are they going to require Congressional approval every time the Sec Treas sets a bond auction, or compel his to issue bonds rather than hold onto cash somewhere?
And if Congress did pass that, Obama would simply sweep it away with a signing statement as an unconstitutional incursion into the authority of the executive branch.
Napoleon
I thought the Speaker does not traditionally make motions or vote. At least in theory he is the leader of the entire house, not a faction.
schrodinger's cat
@RaflW: Don’t you wonder how all the contrary bullshit only goes in direction, the one that favors the rich.
OzarkHillbilly
@JPL: Rainbows in bunkers??? Wow, who’da thunk it?
scav
@Kay: They’re unskewing the nation. They’ve got to avoid polling too.
Another Botsplainer
@Kay: Every Republican in this country is a blackhearted lying thug. There are no moderates. Baynor is right in it with them, this has all been planned because they thought they could roll Obama.
gbear
@Botsplainer:
Why didn’t any of the Dems blow the whistle on this while it was happening? They couldn’t overrule the majority vote but they should have been screaming it from the rooftops when it happened.
JPL
@? Martin: I’m not seeing it anywhere else. It would be a poison pill. It wouldn’t surprise me if they said that abortion clinics had to close for six weeks.
found it http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303382004579127241553500068
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
Captain Orange has the power to end this, and always has. He obviously does not drink the ‘a shutdown is good’ Kool Aid, but he has chosen to make this a fight. Why? I don’t know. I’m guessing ego. He hates Reid and Nancy and Obama for being smarter than him and outmaneuvering him so much, the more so because he can’t even deliver his own side. That’s my guess, but it’s just a guess.
Somebody said ‘And we’ll put in a rule so there can’t be a vote where the RINOs will wimp out on us!’ And someone else said ‘Yeah, that’s the ticket!’
JPL
Here’s more on the potential plan from the wsj
In a potential wrinkle, the GOP plan would permanently ban the Treasury Department from using extraordinary measures to avoid default, congressional aides said……………………………………………………………………….
The provision would ban practices, used by Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, which have effectively allowed the Treasury to limit investments in pensions and other funds when the government bumps up against its borrowing limit. These steps have extended the time that Treasury can continue borrowing and paying the nation’s bills while Congress debates terms for raising the debt ceiling.The White House hasn’t said it whether it would accept the condition as part of any deal, though it effectively would be surrendering tools it uses to avoid falling behind on federal payments. The Democratic-led Senate could reject the provision.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@Emma: Yes, I heard Friedman saying this and expanding on it on NPR a short time ago. I had to wait for the host to repeat his name, because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
billgerat
http://drunkdialcongress.org/
Talk to your….er, a congressman.
Frankensteinbeck
@JPL:
So, another round of the Senate stripping out an amendment and sending it back with a note reading ‘THIS is what you’re voting on, jackasses.’
Chris
@Kay:
We were never in the American category to begin with, which is to a large extent what the culture wars of the last fifty years were all about. I’m not even very old, but I’ve been hearing the subtext for a lot longer than this. 2008 just cranked it up a few decibels.
piratedan
@JPL: yup, these guys are sounding and behaving more like nihilistic anarchists everyday. Someone very machiavellian is pulling some strings behind the scenes and letting the idiocy of its membership distract us from the real close in knife work. Am betting that the Koch letter was planned and timed to allow the debt ceiling to pass (because that hostage is also their own wealth and system for its use) so they can get back to subverting the government.
Belafon
@Dee Loralei: The sentence says “may be offered only by the majority Leader or his designee.” Boehner or someone he designates can offer it, but no one else.
chopper
@JPL:
jesus, with a provision like that in place we would have defaulted at the end of this last may.
these guys really, really want to blow the place up.
chopper
@Belafon:
cantor is the majority leader.
Scotius
@RaflW:
At least he’s getting clobbered in the comments. He and Joe Klein must miss the days they could write incoherent nonsense and not be immediately called out on it.
chopper
@Roger Moore:
right. they likely didn’t want to fully suspend the rule, and making the speaker (who as you mention can put stuff on the floor for a vote any time he wants) wouldn’t make sense. so they restricted it to someone they knew would never, ever ask that a clean CR be offered up for a vote.
fuckin’ dicksacks, every one.
RaflW
@JPL: The extraordinary measures are actually stupid. There is a debt limit. it is a finite amount. Wether the Treasury interprets it as X or 1.0005X, the time is coming.
No one treated the X point as the debt limit, so the extraordinary measures are theater as there is only reaction at one point in the debt dance. Get rid of them, or not, who the f*ck cares.
Belafon
@chopper: My bad.
Suffern ACE
@fuddmain: so why didn’t any of the four Dems say anything? Or did we just not notice until the 11th?
Amir Khalid
@Belafon:
A correction: Eric Cantor is House Majority Leader; John Böhner is Speaker.
ETA: And of course someone beat me to it.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think a big part of the explanation is that Republican public figures operate in a world where they’ll never suffer any real consequences as long as they go along with the party line. The “echo chamber” of right wing think tanks, media outlets, party institutions, private corporations et al isn’t just a propaganda chamber, it’s a jobs program. No matter how badly you fuck up while in office, no matter how completely your constituents reject you, as long as you’ve kept the faith, the powers that be will find you a nice cushy job where you’ll be well taken care of and can remain a major player in the movement.
In a word, patronage. The giant political machine that is movement conservatism does a lot to encourage people like Boehner to tow the party line no matter what. It’s even made considerations like “don’t you want to get reelected” irrelevant, or at least much less of a factor than they otherwise would be. Whether that party loyalty for Boehner goes all the way to supporting a financial meltdown… I guess we’ll find out.
SiubhanDuinne
@fuddmain: My rep, Rob Woodall, is on there too. I am not in the least tiny bit surprised to learn that.
Dee Loralei
@Belafon: yea, but Cantor is the Majority Leader, Boehner is the Speaker. And what Napolean said @30 or so makes more sense historically than my little sniggering that they also hate the real orange Satan.
Villago Delenda Est
So, has “both sides do it!” dickhead Ron Fournier read this? Has he comprehended it? Or is he still in a state of perpetual denial that this entire mess is the result of one party’s self inflicted dysfunction?
These are all, of course, rhetorical questions. There’s no way Ron Fournier will ever do anything but “both sides do it.”
Anoniminous
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yes
MomSense
I hate the Republicans and listening to them speak makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills. They have no respect for our democracy, for the struggles and lives of ordinary people, or for truth. I’m just soooo sick of this. I’m also finished with the idea that there is a tea party wing of the Republican Party. If John Boehner can’t lead the House through the normal functions — the duties required by our Constitution then this is a failure of the Republican Party. Besides, they coddled the crazies and the crazy conspiracy theories in 2009 and 10 so they could take back the house.
I have zero sympathy for them.
Napoleon
@RaflW:
Although I understand your point I think they don’t like it, and the Obama admin likes it, because it gives the Administration a bit of a black box fudge factor in the timing of the default deadline which would to some degree limit the Houses leverage.
Kay
@Chris:
I don’t think that’s true. They still wanted to reach X number of non-conservatives, as late as 2008.
Now it’s not even rejection of huge groups of people, it’s pretending they aren’t there. The Silent Majority was politics. This is “close your eyes and maybe all these millions of people who disagree with us will go away.” There’s absolutely no persuasion element, at all.
Frankensteinbeck
@piratedan:
This is a major underpinning of all their reasoning (such as it is) and actions. Only conservatives count as ‘Americans’. Their rights have been taken away because Americans did not elect Obama, and Americans did not pass this giant new program that will benefit the non-Americans corrupting the country. Voter fraud must be a problem, because non-Americans are electing non-American leaders. This is how tribalism works. We don’t count. For anything.
Anoniminous
@Frankensteinbeck:
Reid will table it. That prevents the the bill from coming to the floor and undercutting any Cruz shenanigans.
IowaOldLady
@Frankensteinbeck: The non-American meme being crystalized in the birthers.
Kay
@Chris:
Tea Party sites are entirely insular. They’re completely focused on the Republican Party. There’s two groups: Republicans and the Tea Party. Forget accepting that liberal voters exist. They don’t even accept that Democratic voters exist.
jl
@Kay: I think it is true that the GOP does not think of group X as being real Americans, unless said group X is prepared to vote for whatever a group of old rich white male farts wants to do. And I say this as a (I hope) pre-old, (I hople) someday rich white male (I hope) non-fart.
So blacks and Native Americans have always been out of the club. And liberals (commies). Other whole groups were considered in, but now suspicious due to not wanting to commit economic suicide: elderly, trade unions, cops, fireman, etc.
Other groups, East Asians, Hispanics South-Asians, big city, various regions, well, they are considered potentially in or out,, depends on whether the GOP has another PR scam ready to run on them ready to try out.
I don’t see how anyone can not see that unless they are not paying attention, or for some reason afraid or ashamed to see it.
Edit: and fact is the size and number of out groups is growing fast, in fact is is now pretty much everyone in the country who is not a rich old white fart, or other whites who are their constant and hopeless dupes. That is why you see GOP voter suppression efforts going into overdrive, and aimed at a whole range of demographics. They are getting desperate, and trying out stuff that cannot go well with public, e.g., read about state GOP two-tiered state and federal voting schemes in TPM.
IowaOldLady
It’ll be interesting to see if they come up with a strategy aimed at women. There’s a huge gender gap in the VA governor’s race, and elsewhere too. But we’re harder to segregate. We live among them.
jl
Interesting to list 20th century GOP presidents who would not be considered real legitimate Americans by GOP, or legit voters, because of ideology, or pragmatism: Teddy Roosevelt, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, the real Ronald Reagan (as opposed to Zombie Reagan, Saint Reagan and Atman Reagan and Godhead Reagan)
And maybe even Dub.
jl
@IowaOldLady: Oh, yeah. I forgot women. You a woman, and you want to control your body during early pregnancy, you don’t want to settle for 10 to 30 (depending on how you figure it) percent lower pay for same work, you want to even control or time when you want to get pregnant, you care about decent health care that you need at certain ages more than goofy dudes, you are not an American, and the legitimacy of your vote is suspect.
That’s only about 50 percent of the population. The GOP has a workaround, or a way to make women not count, exclude them. They are working on, and it will hit the news any day.
Chris
@Kay:
Yep. I remember their reaction after 2008; it was all about how McCain hadn’t done enough to energize the Republican base, and if he hadn’t held back Palin, or if Palin had had the top spot, they totally would have won.
Frankensteinbeck
@jl:
This is part of it, and it’s part of the demographic timer and why they seem to be backpedaling on 50 years of tolerance. When whites were an overwhelming majority, the mildly racist felt comfortable being generous to the lesser races. This was inherent in Reagan’s message. Everybody knew that blacks were poor people confined to inner city ghettos, and the humane thing to do was try to get their children off drugs. Now minorities don’t have to take what they’re given, and that comforting feeling of superiority and control is gone. With it goes any desire to be generous. There’s no ego reward for it anymore.
dedc79
@RaflW: Do the Wrong Thing: The Michael Kinsley Story
jl
@Frankensteinbeck:
” Everybody knew that blacks were poor people confined to inner city ghettos, ”
And that was partly because white racism drove them out of rural areas in many parts of the country.
After what seems like a brief attempt on the part of whites and white private and gov establishment after civil rights breakthrough in 1960s, race bigotry and racism has been driving the politics of the US., and based on a mile high pile of lies It’s disgusting.
Things have been getting better since the 1980s when I remember white guys saying outrageously racist stuff in political opinion media, especially TV. Obama’s election has smoked out a lot of whites’ real attitudes, and it is ugly.
Kay
@Chris:
It went on for years! Palin was polling horribly and they were still treating her as the leader of the Republican Party. How many “leaders” have there been since then? Ted Cruz is the latest. Rubio was the leader for literally like 3 weeks. I think they’re ready to promote that pasty Senator from Utah now. He polls poorly in Utah! I don’t even know how a Republican achieves that.
Frankensteinbeck
@jl:
Yes. Let me be clear, by the way – when I say ‘everybody knew’, I am not claiming it was true, only that I remember vividly how omnipresent that conventional wisdom was. It was a major part of political discourse.
jl
@Frankensteinbeck: Wasn’t pouncing on your or accusing you. I was just venting. Sorry if I seemed to say otherwise.
CVS
And, yet, tinkering with the filibuster is akin to communism…
Frankensteinbeck
@jl:
I didn’t want to leave any doubt. It was conventional wisdom at the time, but it really was a disgustingly racist, condescending, insulting and hateful meme. They’ve been trying to bring it back since Obama was elected, and one of the themes of the 2012 election was the Romney campaign’s confusion that nobody bought that kind of reasoning anymore.
Suffern ACE
@CVS: yep. Dear old timey Dems, you need to decide whether you want comity and tradition when you are in power or whether you want to use power. I don’t think we can have both. I think we’re done with this system.
Chris
@jl:
I don’t think it’s Obama’s election so much as being an adult and now listening to all the adult conversations at family reunions, but the last few years have been kind of an eye opener when it comes to the casual racism among Greatest Generation whites and to a lesser extent Boomers. Not universal (my grandmother and father are very much the opposite of that), but still widespread as hell, the general theme being that “you don’t understand; white people weren’t racist back then, it’s just that
being racist was okay back then!” By and large they’ve learned what not to say in public, but behind closed doors, they genuinely don’t understand what the big deal is/was.Given the mindset, it’s painfully easy to see how lynchings and the like could’ve continued for decades without anyone giving much of a shit.
jl
@Frankensteinbeck: No problem. I agree. I also forgot to add the ‘youth’ group to those whom real GOP do not consider real Americans. At least that shows some broad mindedness on part of GOP since it progressively cuts across racial, ethnic, gender and geographic boundaries.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: True.
They’ve been
programmingteaching their youth this stuff for at least 30 years: I lost out on a scholarship offered by some of the earlier True Believers (didn’t realise it at the time, but looking back the interview wasn’t about whether I was intelligent/informed, but whether I’d drunk the Kool-Aid).There’s only one America according to these nuts, and that America is white, male, Xtian and hetero; all the rest don’t count.
jl
@Chris: I think a lot of whites believe they are tolerant of racial and ethnic equality. But in practice, many are so only as long as the non-‘white” (whatever their definition of ‘white’ is, which is kind of arbitrary) will never threaten them in terms of being on equal footing in terms of real economic or political power.
Amusing or edifying folkloric stereotypes OK, dear friends in need that the white can help is OK. Developments from there on, not OK.
Same goes to lesser extent for working age folks, wrt to ederly and the youths. men versus women.
There is a critical level of too many, too strong, too potentially powerful, then fight or flight reflexes get triggered in many white folk. Thank goodness there has been enough experience of integration and living together now, the number is dwindling.
boatboy_srq
@jl: They have a workaround already. It’s called Tentherism. All those pesky additional amendments that made women and minorities [gasp] equal to men and able to vote and hold office – well, they come well after the BoR, and should rightfully be stricken from the Constitution because the Founding Fathers never intended for their
ni-CLANGsslaves orchattelwomenfolk to participate.fuckwit
The Rethugs are the party of PERPETUAL PUNISHMENT. It’s part of their authoriatarian heritage (foundation, heh).
Like catholic school nuns walking around with a ruler whacking kids on the knuckles.
They are some kinky BDSM motherfuckers, they are. They love, worship, get off on, the power to inflict punishment and suffering.
This also is why they worship the military, and corporations, and the “pecuiliar institution” of slavery, and the catholic and eternal-damnation-and-hellfire megachurches. Any authoritarian form of organization gets them off, makes them feel comfortable and alive.
The whole problem with our country right now is a psychological problem. There’s a cadre of people who really just need to find a BDSM dungeon somewhere and get their power trips out of their system in a safe, sane, and consensual way, instead of trying to order society based on their kinks.
Berial
The tea party view of the future is a human face licking a boot, forever.
The guys behind the movement already own the boot. The dupes that vote for them think they have favored status and will one day be able to get their own smaller boot.
The rest of us don’t matter.
And believe it or not they are getting what they want. If the federal government is broken, shutdown or non-helpful then political power flows to the state and local level. THEY CONTROL THAT LEVEL. This isn’t just about the .01% billionaires. It’s about all those local area millionaires getting more local control, because they’re the only ones with enough money and power to get anything done if the feds are out of the loop. This for them is simply the good ole boys network getting their due.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
IMO, this is what’s behind a lot of the antagonism towards Obama by otherwise liberal white folks. Obama’s original (and deepest) power base is actually in the black political community of Chicago, and he built out from there. He didn’t have to ask for or be handed anything by generous white people — he built that power base himself. More importantly, he doesn’t owe any white politicians for that power base.
That makes him much, much more threatening than, say, a Harold Ford or even a Jesse Jackson, who had to make a lot of compromises with white politicians.
liberal
@Mnemosyne:
LOL.
He made his way to the Presidency in 2004 largely by drawing on midwest AA’s; it had nothing to do with contributions from places like Goldman Sachs.
Deluded we are…
opiejeanne
@jl: Governor Reagan was considerably different from the guy who ran for president.
Steve Gough
To answer the question in the post, it’s killing my small business right now. http://lrrd.blogspot.com/2013/10/stop-government-shutdown-now.html
Ruckus
Why is it these Tea Party clowns only work this hard when they’re destroying something?
Being productive takes at least a modicum of smart. Not necessarily a ton of smart but some is required. The TP clowns are too stupid to even understand modicum. They just don’t know how to be productive. Or to learn much of anything really.